Chronic care management programs that use multidisciplinary clinician teams and in-person communication can reduce hospital readmissions, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published in the new issue of Health Affairs.

Chronic care management programs are designed to improve patient outcomes while saving money, but up until now there has been little conclusive evidence on what types of programs work.

In reexamining data from 10 clinical trials of heart failure care management programs, conducted from 1990 through 2004 in the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, University of Pennsylvania researcher Julie Sochalski, R.N., Ph.D., and colleagues determined that patients in chronic care management programs that adopted a multidisciplinary team approach and in-person communication had significantly fewer hospital readmissions (3%) and readmission days (6%) per month than did patients receiving routine care.